Tracking changes in exploratory behaviour across development

There is vast empirical evidence that childhood is a period of increased curiosity for the world and broad exploration. This exploratory behaviour is manifested both as directed information to resolve uncertainty in the environment, as well as novelty seeking. It has been proposed that both exploratory tendencies gradually become narrower as adulthood is reached, giving space to more exploitative, goal-directed behaviour. However, findings have been contradictory so far, and the exact balance between exploration and exploitation, as well as between exploratory behaviours across development have yet to be clarified. Substantial part of this thesis focuses on the real-time conflict between these options when people are interacting with the world, and how this might change with cognitive control maturation. We are approaching this first by employing hand kinematics analyses in a decision-making task. A second part of this thesis focuses on information in the physical world, and how the available amount of information might influence object manipulation and exploratory behaviour, specifically when varying object complexity. Our results in indicate that children compared to the other groups, specifically when cognitive constraints are applied by the decision context or by individual level of executive functioning skills analyses of kinematic parameters captured meaningful decision-making processes. We also showed that object complexity differentially affects preschoolers’ interest and explicit preferences, especially in the visual domain. Object complexity also significantly affected young children’s still-developing object fitting skills, leading them to use their hands as attentional anchors in the environment. In conclusion, this thesis shows that humans track informational changes with their perception and action since a very early age (3 years old) and assign value to this information in different ways as they grow older, based on their cognitive control maturation, their individual preferences and their contextual or long-term goals

Intentional Binding as a Function of Action-Effect Interval and Semantic Relatedness

Αντιλαμβανόμαστε τις εμπρόθετες κινήσεις μας και τα αισθητηριακά τους αποτελέσματα ως χρονικά εγγύτερα μεταξύ τους, ένα φαινόμενο γνωστό ως ενοποίηση εκ πρόθεσης (intentional binding, IB) και συχνά συνδεδεμένο με την αίσθηση ότι είμαστε υπεύθυνοι των πράξεών μας (Sense of Agency). Οι περισσότερες μελέτες χρησιμοποιούν ως αποτελέσματα της κίνησης απλά μονοτροπικά ερεθίσματα, όμως οι καθημερινές μας κινήσεις συνήθως προκαλούν πολυαισθητηριακά αποτελέσματα. Πρόσφατα, οι Thanopoulos, Psarou και Vatakis (2018), χρησιμοποιώντας ρεαλιστικά πολυαισθητηριακά ερεθίσματα, κατέγραψαν ΙΒ μεταξύ κινήσεων και συνεπειών που συνδέονται με εγγενείς αιτιακές σχέσεις, διαμορφωμένες από την καθημερινή εμπειρία. Στην παρούσα έρευνα, αρχικά διευρύναμε το σύντομο διάστημα μεταξύ κίνησεων και συνεπειών της παραπάνω έρευνας (250ms), ώστε να εξετάσουμε τα χρονικά όρια διατήρησης του φαινομένου σε ρεαλιστικές ακολουθίες. Χρησιμοποιώντας τα ίδια πολυαισθητηριακά ερεθίσματα και σχεδιασμό, εξετάσαμε τους συμμετέχοντες μεταβάλλοντας τις συνθήκες ως προς την ύπαρξη πρόθεσης και την προβλεψιμότητα του αποτελέσματος, σε διαστήματα 250ms, 800ms, 1000ms και 1250ms με έργο κρίσης συγχρονίας. Ακόμη, δεδομένης της χρήσης πολυαισθητηριακών ερεθισμάτων, η εμφάνιση του ΙΒ πιθανώς επηρεάζεται από ανταγωνισμούς κατά την ενοποίηση των διαφορετικών τροπικοτήτων. Συγκεκριμένα, η “υπόθεση της ενότητας” ίσως προκαλεί χρονικές μετατοπίσεις των ερεθισμάτων κάθε τροπικότητας, ώστε να δημιουργείται ενοποιημένο αντίλημμα, αλληλεπιδρώντας με τις χρονικές μετατοπίσεις του ΙΒ. Έτσι, στο δεύτερο πείραμα εξετάσαμε πώς ισχυρά ενοποιημένα πολυαισθητηριακά ερεθίσματα επηρεάζουν το ΙΒ, χρησιμοποιώντας την ίδια αιτιακή ακολουθία με το πρώτο πείραμα και μεταβάλλοντας το σημασιολογικό περιεχόμενο των ερεθισμάτων. Στο πρώτο πείραμα, το οπτικοακουστικό ερέθισμα έγινε αντιληπτό νωρίτερα σε όλα τα διαστήματα ως τα 1000ms, ανεξάρτητα από την ύπαρξη εμπρόθετης κίνησης, με τις χρονικές μετατοπίσεις να αυξάνονται με την αύξηση του διαστήματος. Στο δεύτερο πείραμα, μόνο τα οπτικά αποτελέσματα έγιναν αντιληπτά νωρίτερα, ανεξαρτήτως της σημασιολογικής συμφωνίας με τα ακουστικά ή της ύπαρξης εμπρόθετης κίνησης. Συνολικά διακρίνεται η ισχυρή επίδραση της αιτιακής σχέσης, απαραίτητης για τις χρονικές μετατοπίσεις, που υπερνίκησε την επίδραση της πρόθεσης.Voluntary actions and their sensory effects are perceived closer in time; a phenomenon known as intentional binding (IB). Most up-to-date studies have examined IB employing one-modality action effects, mostly abstract, yet everyday life actions produce multisensory, informationally rich effects. Recently, Thanopoulos, Psarou, and Vatakis (2018) used naturalistic multisensory stimuli as action outcomes and showed that IB occurs when voluntary actions and their effects hold an inherent causal link from everyday experience. Given the short action-effect interval used in Thanopoulos & Vatakis’s study (250ms; as in the majority of IB studies), in our first experiment, we manipulated this interval in order to investigate the limits of maintenance of IB in causal multisensory events. Using the same naturalistic stimuli and the same setup with Thanopoulos and Vatakis, we tested the participants in conditions varying in action intentionality and temporal predictability of the effect for intervals of 250, 800, 1000, and 1250ms using a simultaneity judgment (SJ) task. Further, given the use of a multisensory effect, the induction of IB may be affected by potential crossmodal binding rivalries. Particularly, the unity assumption might cause temporal stimulus shifts in order to reinforce a unified percept, possibly interacting with the temporal shift towards the action, as predicted by IB. Thus, in our second experiment, we investigated how strongly unified multisensory action effects can affect the IB phenomenon, using the same causal sequence of events and procedure as in Experiment 1 and varying the semantic content of the presentations. In our first experiment, the audiovisual pair was perceived earlier regardless of the presence of a voluntary action for intervals up to 1000ms, with the shifts becoming larger as the interval increased, revealing strong temporal binding. In our second experiment, only visual effects were perceived earlier, regardless of their congruency with the auditory stimulus or the presence of a voluntary action. Both results underline the strong influence of causal relations between our stimuli, that were necesssary for the temporal shifts to occur and clearly οvercame the effects of intention

The Development of the Early Child Curiosity Questionnaire

The population group with which one associates curiosity the most is children. To this day, however, only two caregiver reports have been developed to capture variability in children’s curiosity (Piotrowski et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2023). Both are based on specific theoretical frameworks: the interest-deprivation theory (Litman & Jimerson, 2004) and the violation of expectation framework (e.g., Stahl & Feigenson, 2015). Here, we present a novel measure of general curiosity for children between the ages of 2 and 5 years, in which curiosity is captured more broadly where behavioral expressions were not constrained to any specific theoretical framework. The measure is based on the recently created Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire (ITCQ; Altmann et al., in prep), currently undergoing validation, which is applicable to infants up to 2 years of age. For the novel Early Child Curiosity Questionnaire (EECQ), we adapted and extended the item list to capture how this slightly older age group may explore their environment to learn about it. The new questionnaire consists of 41 items covering various exploratory behaviors such as “My child pokes at and probes objects to see how they feel (e.g., cotton balls, play dough, tree bark, etc.)” and “My child typically seeks clarification for things they do not understand (e.g., how something works)”. Caregivers are asked to consider the last six months and rate each item on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (‘strongly disagree’) to 7 (‘strongly agree’) as to how well it reflects their child’s typical behavior. The measure is currently being piloted in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands; thus, we aim to present preliminary results of this international collaboration. The measure will be further developed, and its convergent and discriminant validity evaluated, establishing its internal and external validity for capturing individual differences in curiosity. As a result of this work, the newly developed EECQ will help us better understand the crucial developmental concept that is curiosity and enrich the methodological landscape of developmental research